Laura didn’t need to read it to know what was in the message: Look at this one – it’s got a fabulous hallway! Xxx. Her mother’s new hobby was finding her daughter a home on Rightmove. It was practically an addiction: online real estate porn. It hadn’t helped when Laura had told her that she and James couldn’t afford to buy a house in South London. Her mother had happily said that houses were ‘a lot cheaper near us’ and had started to send links to three-bedroom semi-detached houses in Kent. Three bedrooms for an obvious reason.

That woman back there – Kate – had looked serene and happy. Is that what life was like when you gave up work and became a full-time parent? Lunch dates with your friends whilst the children played happily together. Must be bliss. Laura had to stop doing these mental timelines, calculating the age that someone would have had their first child. If it was thirty-six or more, though, it was strangely comforting. She used to pick up those trashy magazines with exclamation marks in their titles just so that she could read about celebrities who had had their first pregnancy well into their forties. Then her friend Tina had said that a lot of them had to do IVF or use donor eggs. Not that there was anything wrong with that, but there were lots of needles involved in fertility treatment and Laura had once passed out in the middle of Claire’s Accessories trying to get her ears pierced. She’d been revived by a very kind seven-year-old patting her hand.

Alongside the birth age calculating thing, she’d also developed an unhealthy bitterness towards people who were getting married. Up until recently, every time an old school mate announced their engagement/marriage/second child, Laura would email Tina, her last single school friend.

Can you believe it! Rhys Hereford is getting married! Rhys Hereford! He couldn’t even put his shirt on the right way round after PE!

In those days, Tina would commiserate.

ANOTHER ONE! How come all these people can manage it and we can’t? Where do they meet these people?

But now Tina was one of them too. After a whirlwind six months in which she and her now-husband had met, moved in and married. And Laura had been forced to live at the centre of it all. A week-long hen-do in Ibiza where every other woman had been married and had recounted their own wedding day in excruciating detail; a bridesmaid dress which had made Laura look like Bo Peep’s slutty sister; a wedding reception from which James had excused himself at 9.30 p.m. citing a headache, leaving Laura dancing with Tina’s slightly dodgy Uncle Bill.

Since the wedding, other than a painful evening when all the hen-attendees had had a girl’s night at Tina’s to watch the wedding DVD (and two of the freaks had actually come wearing their own wedding dresses for a ‘laugh’), the whole thing seemed to have calmed down. But who the hell was Laura going to email now?

There were still no emails from the distributor, Machon UK. Who knew the world of selling computer printers could be so stressful? Managing the distribution channel from manufacturer to distributor to retailer to end user. She might have more luck opening a stall outside PC World and flogging the damn things to passers-by herself.

Maybe her buyer wasn’t in? Off sick? Dead? Laura shook that thought from her head; that was not nice. And anyway, if they were dead, someone else would just take over and return the two thousand units of unsold printers in their warehouse. No, better they were just off sick long enough for her to get home from the sales meeting. Robert’s wrath would be easier to deal with over the phone than in person. Maybe. At least she wouldn’t have ‘the stare’ over the phone. Heaven help her from that. It made her want to frantically confess everything she’d ever done wrong, from missed sales opportunities to nail polish stolen from Boots on a dare when she was fourteen.

A dubious-looking coffee materialised and Laura edged back towards her seat. James had pronounced his advice on dealing with her distributor last night in his usual condescending way. ‘You just need to be firm, Laura.